My baby came into the world wanting a 4th trimester. He cried incessantly, woke up every forty-minute intervals day and night, panicked at sound of every tug of his velcro diaper tab, felt distressed in the car, was terribly upset about blenders, lawn mowers, restaurants, strangers, sunlight, wind, the doorbell, the telephone and being rocked in a rocking chair back and forth. His nervous system was, as he now puts it twelve years later, “raw.”
In the countless articles and books about how to “soothe a crying baby,” there is little or no mention of this. Many doctors, authors and other experts talk extensively about hunger and gas and fatigue, even loneliness, but nobody explained that my baby might just have had a sensory assault to his system having left the cozy womb because his nervous system wasn’t organized for this world just yet.
I can remember how anxious I felt during these first weeks when “nothing I did” seemed to “work.”
And then, I realized. The soothing that we hear and read about is about stopping the cry.
Nothing was going to “work,” because it wasn’t about making him stop crying--it was about deeply understanding the process, practice and gift of soothing. What did that mean? Hey, didn’t I need soothing, too? I felt weak in the knee. I felt like I couldn’t “make it better.” Fix it. I held him close and nursed and walked and sang and breathed and still, he cried and cried and cried. And then...
Oh, these moments play tricks on a new parent’s confidence. It isn’t that our baby doesn’t like us or approve of our “ability” to mother or father, but that, this is a chance for us, as grown survivors of our own early emotional collisions and trauma, to come face to face (cry to cry) with our long-lived practice of reacting reflexively to the first sounds of stress---and start exploring the act of surrender. This is not an easy shift. There is, after all, no off switch. Instead, it’s kind of like re-wiring the system. My initial response to our baby’s incessant cry was to feel like crying myself. When I did bawl like my newborn, I suddenly felt some kind of compassion for myself. When I felt like collapsing, crumbling, cursing or cowering...I learned to soothe my own heart. Not with my previous incessant head-talk, no, there were no words for this kind of language of self-compassion. It was like a deep inner holding of my own self, a kind of warm blanket of empathy I had to learn to knit all on my own. That’s how I learned to soothe my baby.
God knows it felt itchy at first. After awhile, I didn’t consciously reach for the blanket anymore. It had gradually woven itself into my body’s circuitry and system from the inside out.
It was in those moments that I learned to birth the first inklings of compassion for my baby’s needs.
The art of surrender is an act of compassion--for ourselves, first and foremost. When we hold that kind of feeling for ourselves, our babies “feel” it too. We hold them slightly differently. We breathe differently. We may stop “bouncing” them so much and start finding more fluid movements that flow with their true needs. We find...synergy.
All this through...a baby’s cry?
Yes. But...
Our culture has a thing about crying. We don’t like it. It threatens us on many levels.
-
1)Auditory: We think it’s noisy. Shhhh! Quiet that baby down! It isn’t just strangers in passing, but us too. Some relatives may tell us that a crying baby is a sign of a demanding character. Sometimes, people in positions of authority come down hard on babies for doing what babies do when they’re distressed. Like the airline pilots who asked a family to leave the plane before pushing back from the gate because their 2 year-old was crying so loudly that it was deemed too disruptive to the passengers.
-
2)Emotional: We feel anxious and worried about crying if it triggers our own vulnerabilities and sense of helplessness.
-
3)Historical: We carry long stories about crying based largely on how our own cries were met.
-
4)Medical: We think crying is a sign that something is “wrong.”
The list goes on.
What does crying signify for us? What do we associate with it? How does it affect our senses, our hearts and our reactions?
When I got my own stories clear about crying--I’m doing something wrong; he doesn’t like me--I was able to “hear” and therefore connect with my baby’s distress when I’d rub his back to release pressure from his belly as he nursed and gulped air down too. I vividly remember, even ten years later, this tiny passing a-ha moment, when I consciously changed my voice tone during these stressful moments to a tone of empathy. I remembered how I lowered my voice a few notes...slowed down my cadence...and shared my words from the heart instead of my head.
“I know....oh yes....I heeeear you, myyyy love...yes...it huuurts....” while I rubbed and he cried. And after that first time when I Soothed with Empathy as opposed to Soothing with a Need for Results, his cry completely changed. I heard it anew, for sure, but his cry was different. It was less agitated. Less pained. Less low notes, less breathlessness. More sweet moaning between catching his breath. Oh, it felt so clear and human to me!
He sensed that I was working WITH him as opposed to putting pressure on him to stop fussing. His level of stress was reduced with my humble offering of empathy, with my level of stress eased by my own empathy for myself. It was as if he knew I didn’t “need” him to be quiet and didn’t have any agenda for what I wanted him to “do.”
Over the months, we got to know him on a multi-sensory level, understanding how he liked to be rocked, from side to side in deep squats, how he liked music to sleep and close proximity and nursing when he might have otherwise developed other ways of soothing. It was the crying and responding in countless iterations and cycles that forged a bond of trust between us. Science tells us that this is a deeply neurological process, wherein our right brains communicate with each other, moment by moment, even through our missed cues and signals, to “find” each other and attune for optimal growth and development. To miss and dismiss the cries is to miss and dismiss the significance of this developmental responsibility.
Our response-ability.
Our culture says a baby who self-soothes is already on the road to independence. But thousands of studies, articles, books and hours of research on attachment completely de-bunks this myth. The truth is, a baby learns to “self-soothe” by being soothed by us within the attachment---through the relationship---rather than finding ways to comfort himself in the absence of it. Many parents feel that they are doing a disservice to their child if they don’t sometimes “let him rely on himself” for comfort. The most recent robust science shows that this is a mistaken belief based in fear rather than an intuitive knowledge that we, as human beings, thrive through a process of trust and security intimately woven into our selfhood just as we eat and breathe.
So, rather than figuring out how we can stop or minimize a baby’s crying, we can start thinking that he is processing the big, bright, loud, vibrating, busy world he just came into, and that means parenting as if we just developed our own senses for the first time.
Copyright 2009-11 Lu Hanessian All rights reserved
Lu Hanessian is the author of Let the Baby Drive: Navigating the Road of New Motherhood (2004), an award-winning journalist, parent educator and national speaker. She is the founder of Parent2ParentU.com and a new socially-conscious company called WYSH Wear Your Spirit for Humanity (www.wearyourspirit.com) Visit www.letthebabydrive.com for more information on Lu’s book, speaking and articles.
Copyright 2009, 2011 by Lu Hanessian All rights reserved. If you’d like to reprint to share, please include the entire article with credit and website link. Thank you!
